Hagar smiled, sat without speaking, waiting, her eyes upon Thomson putting the last touches to the table, and Mahomet thrusting long-stemmed irises into the vases, the faces of both discreetly masking whatever interest they might feel in the proposed itinerary. When, after another minute or two, they were gone from the room, "Were you waiting for them to go? Why, who keeps anything from Thomson? He knows my innermost soul. I told him this morning I was thinking of South America." Hagar rose, and with her hands behind her head, began slowly to pace the large room. "Bogotá _qua_ Bogotá is all right. You've the surest instinct, of course, when it comes to matching your mood with your place. You're a marvel there, as you are in so many ways, father! And Thomson and Mahomet would like it, too, I think." "Do you mean that you won't like it?" "No. I should like it very much. But I am not going, father." Medway made an impatient movement, "We have had this before--" "Yes, but not so determinedly.... Why not agree that the battle is over? It _is_ over." "And you rest the conqueror?" "In this--yes." "I could see," said Medway, "some point in it if the existence you lead with me made the fulfilment of your undoubted talent--your genius, perhaps--impossible. But you write wherever we go. You work steadily." "Yes," said Hagar, "but the work by which you live is not all of life." "It seems to me that you have touched life at a good many points in these eight years." "Being with you," said Hagar, "has been a liberal education." She laughed with soft, deliberate merriment, but she meant what she said. From a slender green vase she took an iris, and coming to the wheel-chair knelt down and drew the long stalk through the appropriate buttonhole. "You must have as large a bouquet as that!" she said. "Yes, a university and a training-ship! I can never be sufficiently grateful!" They both laughed. "Well, you've paid your way!" he said; "literally and metaphorically. I suppose two gratitudes cancel each other--" "Leaving an understanding friendship." She grew graver. "A good deal of love, too. I want you to realize that." She laughed again. "I do not always approve you, you know, but, thank God! I can love without always approving!" Medway nodded. "I like a tolerant woman." She rose and stood, regarding him with a twisted smile, affectionate and pitying. "I think that you are a fearfully selfish man--to quote Stevenson, quoted by Henley, 'an unconscious, easy, selfish person.' And I think that, of your own brand, you have grit and pluck and stamina for twenty men. There's no malice or envy in you, and you're intellectually honest, and you can be the best company in the world. I am very fond of you." "Aren't you the selfish person not to be willing to go to Bogotá?" "Perhaps--perhaps--" said Hagar Ashendyne, "but I am not willing." "What is it that you do want?"